Posted
by
Zonk
on Wednesday November 08, 2006 @04:18PM
from the three-stories-good-music-lots-of-guns dept.

Gamasutra reports that Rockstar will be releasing all three modern Grand Theft Auto titles as a bundle, simply called 'Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy'. The GTA three-pack will retail for $39.99, and should release on December 4th. From the article: "The collection is believed to be one of the last to carry the Grand Theft Auto name for the PlayStation 2, with the next iteration in the franchise, Grand Theft Auto IV, already announced for simultaneous release for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in North America on October 16, 2007 and in Europe on October 19, 2007. Take Two has previously announced, however, that an unnamed 'current generation' port of its handheld Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories will be released by Spring 2007, continuing its recent habit of debuting GTA side stories on the PSP and subsequently porting them to current-gen (generally PlayStation 2) hardware." I don't own any GTA titles at the moment, so this might be a good buy for me.

... as long as it comes in something more sturdy than the cardboard box that the "Collector's Edition" of GTA: San Andreas came in, that tore apart before it even got off the shelves at GameStop. What would be really nice is if they included graphical upgrades like they did with the collection for the X-Box, bring GTA III and Vice City up to San Andreas graphics quality. That'd be worth the money.

If you want to play the games on your computer, Grand Theft Auto I and II are available for free on Rockstar's website [rockstargames.com]. I bought Grand Theft Auto III for $10 at Walmart over a year ago. It's probably still available.

>> I don't own any GTA titles at the moment, so this might be a good buy for me.

man that smells like a sponsored post right there.

truth is, if you dont have any GTA title yet its probably because you're not a big GTA fan to begin with, and if you are but have pirated them instead (bad boy!) then you won't want to buy them either.

Great point! Obviously, the GTA franchise has been struggling to get sales traction and publicity. A Slashdot article might just save the company and finally get a couple interested in these sleeper titles.

A couple of missions got repetitive now and then, but I thought most of the missions in all 3 games made you do something sufficiently different to make it worth it. Combine that with the sheer joy of driving around and wreaking havoc for a while, and you have a lot of gameplay.

This is great indeed for PS2 fans who never got into the franchise. I own Vice City for both PS2 and for PC, and in fact I have GTA III and San Andreas for PC as well.

If you have a competent gaming PC (certainly not state of the art... but not a barebones w/ business graphics), it would be worth the extra couple bucks to buy the three of them for PC instead. I don't think it would cost an awful lot more.

Differences:1. The graphics are better (and more adjustable).2. You can modify the game in various ways if you ever wish to do so (yes there's the X-rated mod for San Andreas, but there are others).3. The load times are almost nonexistant (i.e. when hopping from island to island). Really, when you're going 140 and everything just stops dead for 10 seconds or so while it loads the other island, it can get frustrating.4. It's easier to back up saved games on PC, since they're just files in your My Documents folder; none of that memory pack crap. This also makes it easy to save games with cheat codes enabled (seriously hysterical things are possible with the cheat codes, but they prevent you from achieving 100% game completion if you save with them).

There are other little perks here & there.

In case you're wondering, there are plenty of gamepads available for PC with essentially the same buttons that the PS2 controller has... my Logitech has nice software that lets you map gamepad buttons to particular keys and/or other input actions, and can be set up to play EXACTLY like the PS2 version. I never liked the default control setup for PC, so this was important to me.

Finally, if you get on eBay and grab a copy of the first San Andreas release, you can use the "hot coffee" mod, if you are so inclined (the previously mentioned X-rated mod which sparked so much controversy when it became known). The latter releases aren't capable of this, as far as I know.

Of course it's still cool that, for PS2-only gamers, you can get them all so cheap! You save at least $100 off their combined initial release prices.

Conclusion: If you're going for all three of them at once, the PC versions are (IMHO) worth the extra money if your PC can deal with it. I have an Athlon XP 3000+ (32-bit) w/ 1GB RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro, and 5.1 sound... it's far superior to the PS2 versions... even works great on my laptop (a ThinkPad T42 w/ fairly similar specs).

The only GTA I've played on my computer is GTA III, but IMHO the controls suck. On the PS2 the controller controls everything. On the computer, I can't map too much to the gamepad and it still doesn't work quite right (ie, moving around). You're stuck with awkward key combinations and the mouse. Then again, most computer games I've used in the last few years seem to suffer from the same problems which is why I prefer consoles.

oh, thats right, they did. [gamespot.com] it came out for the Xbox, too! [gamespot.com]
it hit October of 2005 (november for ps2). now, i'm not necessarily a zonk-hater (in fact, I think the guy gets a mostly unfair bad rap), but..... this product isn't anything new: it has existed for a long while. the real news is, simply, that they're dropping the price.

Considering that the PS2 is STILL outselling every console out there - including the 360 - it's a pretty good move. I'll probably even get the PS2 port of Vice City Stories when it comes out next year sometime just because it'd be nice to play the missions on the big-screen. The music is probably the best in the franchise as well.Plus - although they improved some of the Liberty City Stories control shortcomings on the PSP, some missions are nice with the Dual-Shock controllers (vehicle racing missions part

Not trolling one system vs the other, I just have a thought on a possible problem with GTA4 on the 360.

From what I understand they have been already filling up a DVD with San Andreas (and possibly the previous games?) What will this mean for the 360? Obviously Rockstar will want to make GTA4 a big improvement over previous titles if they can. The textures are going to be larger, more models with more detail, the world bigger, more voice acting, more music, whatever else they can do. If they are already fi

Contrast:1. The graphics are better (and more adjustable).1) I have a 62" fucking tv. Can't complain about resolution because my tv doesn't really do more than 720p. I'm not running my computer to the tv just for a video game. Plus if you don't have exactly the right kind of joystick, you can't finish some of the required missions.

2. You can modify the game in various ways if you ever wish to do so (yes there's the X-rated mod for San Andreas, but there are others).2) the only other mod that is worthwhil

Wow. Sixty-two inches. I can only imagine how poor a game would look even at 1080p on such an unnecessarily huge screen. 1280x1024 on a 17" CRT or 1600x1200 on a 19" is several orders of magnitude more crisp. These resolutions have been feasible for gaming on the PC for many years now. Overpriced and overrated HDTV is still lagging behind and is only truly impressive to the PC ignorant, though I'm sure it's nice for movies. But you weren't talking about movies.And on that note, joysticks are for flight

what makes the pc version of gta so much better?i'm not ignorant of the pc. i have a 17" trinitron crt, i have a beefed up gaming rig that i use to mostly play counterstrike with. console games were designed with the console in mind, so you don't have to sit up close to a 15" monitor to follow the game. similar to movies, i can watch it on my laptop for a sharper image, but i have a 42" lcd in my room that i can lay back in my bed and enjoy watching with my gf.

I don't have all the answers, but San Andreas on the PS2 is a single-layer DVD, 4.3Gb. I've got the PS2 hard drive, and I transfer my games to that for the loading performance, which helps there as well.

So I'm sure it will be ok - Saint's Row on the 360, while being a general let-down, the problems with it certainly weren't caused by lack of disc space.